The Pattern Scars (51 page)

I sat.

He tugged four lengths of golden rope from his belt. He looped one of the strands under the chair arm. I snatched my own arm away. “You don’t need to do that to me,” I said. Borl was beside me, growling and bristling. Teldaru shoved at him with his foot and Borl snapped at his leg, but he fell back, and sat.

“Do I not?” Teldaru shook his head.

He bound my wrists to the chair arms. He bound my ankles to the legs. The girl was quiet, and I was quiet; he hummed a Pattern-song. When he was finished with me he went to stand behind her. He ran his thumb down her cheek. Her eyes widened a little more but she did not flinch.

“She will not bleed,” he said to me, “but you must.” And he walked back to me, holding the dagger—the tiny jewelled one. This time I strained toward it, against bonds and hatred. He rucked my dress up, his hands scrabbling at cloth and then skin. He cut me on my left thigh. I watched my skin open. I watched the line of blood bead and seep, and the hatred was for me—for my hunger and my joy.

He pricked his forefinger and squeezed so that his blood dripped onto mine. He bent and drew his tongue along my cut. When he lifted his head his smile was wet and smudged.

I saw the gold vanish from his eyes. I felt tugging—the tight ache that was him within me, drawing my Paths together or apart. The girl gave another groan and a panting sob, and I made a sound too, that was like one of Uja’s little songs. I thought,
He is flooding my burned black Paths with silver.
He sank to his knees. I gazed at his Othersighted eyes and the space between his bloodied lips. No Selera, no Laedon, no squirming girl or whining dog. Teldaru and I were alone.

It was a very long time before he blinked. He looked at me blankly, between worlds for one more breath, and then he saw me.

“What . . . I do for you.” His voice was not as weak as it had been the first time he had changed my Pattern.
He
was not as weak; he rose slowly, almost immediately, and stretched his arms above his head.
He is more powerful all the time
, I thought with a shiver.
The more he uses Bloodseeing, the more effortless it is.

“Let’s see, then.” My own voice shook. “Let’s see what you’ve done for me.”

“No more blood,” he said. “So choose. How will you Othersee for her?”

I wet my lips. “Wax on water.”

He chuckled as he walked to the small round table by the door. “I guessed. It has always been your favourite.” He picked up the goblet and the stubby stick of wax that were waiting there. Deep red wax, I saw when he brought these things to me. He wedged the goblet stem between my thighs and held the wax over a candle. One quick, delicate drop, and another, much more sluggish and round, behind it. I wrenched my gaze from it to him.

I said, clearly enough that she would hear me, “Do not hurt her.”

He smiled. “Soft-hearted girl. She is a brothel brat, just as you were. We will let her go, and even if she tells someone, it will not matter. Now look, love. Look down.”

Tiny dark islands joined and parted, congealing on their sea. So simple—the first way Yigranzi had shown me. I thought of her, and I thought of the other girl—Larally—the one who had died after I had told her the vision I thought I had understood. I tipped the goblet with my thighs, just a bit, so that I could see a shadow of this girl, and Teldaru’s shadow moving in close to her. “Say them,” he said, “the words I told you to”—and he must have taken her gag off, for she let out a piercing shriek. I heard him slap her. I saw her shadow-head snap back. I heard words—hers, mumbled and broken, and his, low and angry: “Say them, whore, or I kill you.”

“Tell me.” She spoke a bit louder, but the words were still broken. “Tell me what will come, for me.”

Her shadow rippled and the wax scattered and so did the world around me.

The vision feels the same. The images—spinning rain with coloured facets—faces and forms in each. Time-to-come and Paths already walked. A kitten with snow melting on its fur; an arc of blue sky; a man’s hairy-toed feet sliding into red leather shoes stitched with silver thread. And a wolf, turning its long, dark muzzle to wind I cannot feel. A wolf—the same, or maybe not—hunkered in a doorway spattered with mud and clumps of hair. Flames licking around its paws and up into its eyes, curling the edges of every Path, of the Pattern itself—and yet the wolf’s eyes burn brighter, and do not blink.

My dress was sodden, clinging to my thighs. The goblet was on the floor. Teldaru was kneeling by me again, his hands on my calves. The after-vision was like a sheet of water, shuddering and silver.

Silver.

“What did you see?” he said.

My mouth opened as it always had, since the curse: almost without my noticing, and certainly without my caring. Why take care, when nothing was true?

“A rich man’s feet in red leather shoes.”

As soon as these first words were out, I should have been on my feet. I should have tried to run away from him, with this one, slender Path restored—but I did not. I sat. My body was a dead, leaden thing; only my voice moved. I laughed, but there were tears too, and I choked and gasped until there was room for more words.

“A wolf in the wind and another in a brothel doorway. Hair from the dead stuck to the brothel’s stones with mud and shit”—I was Uja once more, and every word was a note, a glossy, glorious feather—“and then fire—the Pattern burning Paths to ash.”

The girl’s face twisted as Larally’s had, years ago. Years ago, and yet I was the same: I was unbound power, and there was no Yigranzi to punish me this time; only Teldaru bending his smooth, shadowed face to kiss me.

“Thank you,” I said against his lips. “Thank you—oh, thank you . . .” Burning, myself, with desire for what I used to have, and for more. For all he had promised me.

He eased himself away. I was still gibbering—the vision words, now, over and over, a Pattern-song of spittle and triumph. He walked over to the girl. I noticed that her gag was back on, and that it was soaked dark. I noticed this with my old eyes, which my voice did not care about. These eyes watched him wrench the gag out of her mouth; watched him kiss her, and her thrash her head back and forth. She screamed once, and there was an answering screech—Uja, from beyond this room. Maybe it was this sound that brought me back, even before he set the jewelled dagger against the girl’s throat and cut.

“The wolf,” I heard myself say. “The wind in its fur. Its ears are flat. It’s brindled and hungry.” I gave one more crow of a laugh.

“There we are.” He was before me, pricking his finger again. “You see what I will do for you—this and more, when the battle’s done.”

I shuddered as he slipped back into my Otherworld, to unmake what he had so briefly remade. I looked at the open lycus blossom of the brothel girl’s throat and I cried, but not for her.

When he was done, the windows were filled with a dull grey light and I was not crying any more. “Come,” he said, and held out his hand to me. He finally looked weary; grey himself, except for bruised purple patches under his eyes. Both of our hands were shaking.

I saw wolves and mud
, I tried to say, but what I did say was, “I saw a glade with a dry cracked fountain.” I was too tired for more laughter or tears, though both of these rose in my throat.

“Hush,” he said. He pulled me to my feet and I sagged against him and he staggered back to balance us. We shuffled to the door. I turned toward the stairs, when we went out into the hallway, but he said, “No—this way,” and we walked to the mirror room instead.

I thought:
I cannot look at Mambura. At any of them—Selera or Laedon or the dead girl—and not at Mambura either. I want to see only my castle bed, and Leylen’s plain, living face.
But I did look at him, of course. He was lying where he had been before, dark and blinking. Teldaru stepped around him. He stood by the mirror and drew me up beside him.

The mirror’s bowl was covered with bones—so many that they shone from every one of the golden facets. They were very old; I knew this immediately because they were smooth and yellow, and because I had seen so many bones, by now. These belonged together. All the ribs, and the hips, and the long legs and knobby hands—they were one man’s.

“Ranior,” I said.

He squeezed my hand. “Touch him, Nola. Go on.” But I already was. I vaguely remembered having plucked up Selera’s ribs because they had been slender and small, but this time I pulled away from Teldaru’s grip so that I could use both of my hands, and I picked up the skull.

Teldaru laughed.

I ran my fingers over the hinge of jaw and up around the dome. I almost expected to feel knobs—scars from the War Hound’s shorn-off ears.

“You see?” Teldaru said, has hands gentle on mine. “Look how close we are—you are. Soon you too will be whole again.”

I used to begin some of these sections by describing the sky, or my thoughts about the words themselves. My thoughts about where I am, not where I was. I haven’t done this in a long time—partly because I no longer need to feel my way into the writing, and partly because I’ve been realizing something, and I’m afraid that if I let my quill stop moving across the page for too long, I’ll have to write of this something, too.

I’ve been concentrating so intently on the before and the now, but I’m beginning to see the after. It swims up at me, wobbly as an image in a dented copper mirror, but its edges are clear enough. And I’m terrified, looking at it, and excited too, and this only makes me more terrified.

But no more—for I won’t write of it. Not yet. I need to peer down at it a little longer.

So back I go, again.

Queen Zemiya, it was quickly decided, did not love her daughter.

“Jamenda says the princess cries and cries,” Leylen told me, “and the queen just stares out the window. Only the king tries to soothe the baby. And Jamenda says the queen has an island woman to nurse the child—and this is never done on Belakao.”

No one saw them, except for servants and the king. I heard my students muttering that the queen had gone mad, or even died, and Haldrin was so worried about Bantayo’s wrath that he was hiding it. I heard them say the child had died too. I heard them say the child had strange, distant eyes that saw nothing of this world. “Stop your gossiping,” I snapped at them. “They are both well. We will all see them soon.”

And we did a month later, at the baby’s naming feast. Winter had begun to give way to spring; on the night of the feast I smelled lycus blossoms as I was crossing the seers’ courtyard. I stopped and looked up into the trees and saw nothing but branches, bare and black, but still I smelled it: petals and green, somewhere close.

The Great Hall was streaked with late afternoon light. The copper plates on the lower tables shone; the silver ones on the dais table did too, and so did the jewels in Zemiya’s hair. There seemed to be hundreds of them—she was wreathed in colours that would have danced, if she had moved. She did not. She sat beside Haldrin and gazed at her plate. She did not look at him, or at the baby he held against his chest.

The baby was crying. Not crying—wailing, so piercingly that the sound rose above the clinking of metal and—later—the sonorous words of the poet, and—later yet—the music. I was glad of the noise, when I first sat down beside Zemiya, because I thought I would not have to speak to her, or to Teldaru, who was on my other side. But very quickly the squalling made me think of my own siblings, and hunger, and filth, and our mother, who had not cared for any of us. I leaned forward a bit to see past the queen. The baby was a tiny, round head whose black curls frothed beneath Haldrin’s chin, and a pair of clenched and waving fists that Haldrin caught in his own huge hand and kissed. He did not seem to mind the screeching. He cradled the lace-draped bundle effortlessly in one arm and beamed—except when he looked at Zemiya.